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Labor tensions along the West Coast’s ports continued to play out in public over the weekend and on Monday, with employers accusing union dockworkers of withholding work amid a year-long contract dispute that has raised concerns about shipping delays and higher costs for customers and retailers.
The Pacific Maritime Association — which represents the businesses that operate the U.S. West Coast port terminals where longshoremen load and unload ships carrying much of the clothes, furniture, electronics and other goods arriving from Asia — alleged on Monday that the union kept workers off the shipyards, delaying ship departures.
The International Longshore & Warehouse Union, which represents the dockworkers, declined to comment on the allegations.
“For months, the ILWU has staged disruptive work actions targeting the West Coast’s largest ports,” the Pacific Maritime Association said in a statement on Monday. “These actions have either slowed operations or shut them down altogether, impeding the supply chain and leaving ships and the American exports they carry sitting idle at the docks.”
That statement alleged that a day earlier, the ILWU withheld staffing for cargo-handling operators at two of the biggest import hubs — the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., — and did not fill orders for labor from several terminal operators at those ports. At the Port of Seattle, the association said, the union slowed work or didn’t send longshore workers to terminals, effectively halting operations. The PMA did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
The union, in previous remarks, has said the ports were still open. And it has said that the terminal operators saw profits boom through the pandemic, while dockworkers risked their health racing to unload goods from shipping containers amid a surge in online shopping in 2020 and 2021.
“We aren’t going to settle for an economic package that doesn’t recognize the heroic efforts and personal sacrifices of the ILWU workforce that lifted the shipping industry to record profits,” ILWU International President Willie Adams said earlier this month, when the Pacific Maritime Association accused the union of disrupting port operations. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach saw similar disruptions in April.
On Saturday, the union pushed back against the PMA’s allegations.
“The Pacific Maritime Association continues using the media to leverage one-sided information in attempt to influence the process,” the union said on Saturday.
“Despite what you are hearing from PMA, West Coast ports are open as we continue to work under our expired collective bargaining agreement,” Adams said Saturday.
The contract, the union said, covered more than 22,000 dockworkers at 29 ports on the U.S. West Coast. That agreement expired on July 1 last year. Negotiations began in May 2022.
For retailers and other businesses, the friction at ports has refreshed anxieties over the 2021 supply-chain chaos, when the pandemic disrupted factory production and led to container-ship traffic jams along waterfronts and shipping congestion further inland. Shipping costs for businesses ballooned, and businesses passed those costs on to their customers.
Last week, the National Retail Federation, an industry group, noted that the dispute was unfolding as retailers prepared for the holidays. And the group called on the Biden administration to step in to broker a new agreement.
“As we enter the peak shipping season for the holidays, these additional disruptions will force retailers and other important shipping partners to continue to shift cargo away from the West Coast ports until a new labor contract is established,” David French, the NRF’s senior vice president of government relations, said in a statement last Monday. “It is imperative that the parties return to the negotiating table.”
